Bharara: Redoubling Efforts Against Corruption

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara gestures to a chart during a news conference in New York on April 4.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said Monday that his office has greatly intensified its anti-corruption efforts in the last year and a half in the face of what he has called “pervasive” corruption in state government.

“Given the unmistakable pervasiveness of corruption, we are, as you might imagine, redoubling our efforts and will seem to be even more aggressive than in the past, and you’ve seen some of the fruits of that resolve in recent weeks,” Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, told an audience of prosecutors and policymakers at a breakfast hosted by the Citizens Crime Commission Monday in Manhattan.

“It means adding resources to the fight,” Bharara said. “In the last 18 months we’ve added people in our public corruption unit.”

In his speech Monday, the U.S. Attorney detailed the long list of public officials in the state who have been arrested in recent months and years on corruption charges — including a New York State senator and a New York City councilman accused of trying to sell a seat on the 2013 mayoral ballot. The defendants have denied wrongdoing in the case.

“Is corruption in New York rampant and is it worse than it is elsewhere?” he asked. “I think all the available evidence says the answer, sadly, is yes.”

Bharara, who has been outspoken about the need for far-reaching anti-corruption reforms, said the scale of corruption in New York’s government has grown to levels beyond the reach of a prosecutor alone.

“We can’t just prosecute our way to cleaner government,” he said. “It seems that such a culture has become so embedded that even a series of tough and successful prosecutions that have separated so many lawmakers from their liberty has not been enough to thwart others from following in their felonious footsteps.”

Bharara said prosecutors face broad, structural obstacles to pursuing public corruption trials in New York State. Lawmakers, for example, can moonlight as attorneys and accountants, something Bharara said can make it difficult for investigators to separate legitimate money transfers by public officials from illicit ones.

The U.S. attorney also said a lack of transparency in state government can make identifying misbehaving lawmakers tricky.

“A government website that is so difficult to navigate that it is nearly impossible to piece together any real life understanding of the information that it purports to convey,” he said, “is not that much more helpful at the end of the day than keeping the information locked away in a file cabinet.”

“We should sometimes perhaps hold our applause for certain transparency measures until we scrutinize whether they truly reveal anything about the workings and behavior of our government and our public officials.”

Bharara said addressing corruption in the state would require an effort beyond the U.S. attorney’s office.

“When a state legislator can be convicted of corruption crimes and still keep his lifelong pension, people lose faith,” he said. “Does anyone who is not drunk on power,” the U.S. attorney asked, “think this is remotely rational?”